Sabrina Carpenter – Man's Best Friend
Sabrina Carpenter returns with an adventurous new album that leans into her now-trademark sense of humour and innuendo, with mixed results
Sabrina Carpenter’s seventh album, Man’s Best Friend is a musically adventurous record, which pushes her into stranger and more ambitious territory than ever. It pulls from retro pop, soft rock, disco and synth textures – one song features a straightforward ABBA callback. Sometimes it swells into huge cinematic arrangements, other times stripping things right back so that Carpenter’s Dolly Parton-like vocals sit over spindly percussion.
The production feels genuinely collaborative, letting Carpenter try ideas that don’t always land neatly but are consistently intriguing. It’s a playful, detail-oriented record which reveals more with each relisten, but if you’re looking for the clean hit of a song like Espresso, you probably won’t find it here.
Still, there are moments of poppy immediacy. My Man on Willpower is an infectious, knowing bop about pining for someone who’s clearly checked out: 'He used to be literally obsessed with me… He’s busy. He’s working. He doesn’t have time for me. Where he’s gone, God only knows'. Go Go Juice has shades of early Shania Twain, a delightfully danceable ode to drunk dialling your exes over country-inflected beats.
Carpenter is at both her best and her worst when she leans into humour, which is threaded throughout the record. It’s a continuation of what’s made her so memorable in the past: the campy innuendo of Bed Chem’s 'come right on me… I mean camaraderie' or her viral 'have you ever tried this one?' sex position-asides on tour. Here, that same instinct bubbles up everywhere; sometimes brilliantly, sometimes too much.
Tears, an otherwise funny song about the attractiveness of a guy who can both do the dishes and assemble IKEA furniture, ends up orbiting around the joke that tears are running down her thighs. The whole thing becomes too much on House Tour, a track where the innuendos reach an excruciating climax. No wait, I mean they… come to a head? No, that’s worse. They boil over? That sounds wrong, too. Help, my brain has been Sabrina Carpentered!
Every line is delivered like it’s meant to be sexy, even when it isn’t. 'I promise this is not a metaphor,' she sings, daring you to find one in the song’s every word. 'Never enter through the back door'. Got it. 'I spent a little fortune on the waxed floors'. Fine. 'The couch is really comfy'. Cool? 'It’s insured!' You’re losing me, Sabrina.
Oddly, when she aims for sincerity in this area the effect can be even more unsettling. We Almost Broke Up Last Night, a genuinely pretty track with Mariah Carey-at-Christmas sparkle, trades the wink-wink wordplay for the blunt reportage of 'we had our sex', a line so stark and perfunctory it makes you long for the daft non-metaphors of House Tour. Because whatever else this album is: ambitious, funny, inventive, self-aware... it is never, ever genuinely sexy.
Listen to: My Man on Willpower, Go Go Juice